Except that he wasn't generalizing, as you are, but talking about a specific region - where he happens to live. Are you familiar with the native history of that region well enough to really call him on it?
You mean you think the CIA *doesn't* track religious fanatics and militants who may pose a threat to the US? Like islamic terrorists, for example?
I definitely agree with your statement about religions and wars, btw:) What I took issue with was the silly broadness of your last statement; it's obvious that the CIA has to pick and choose what they have the resources to keep track of, and those resources are not infinite.
But don't feel insulted; *everyone* says stupid things on occasion (some people more than occasionally), including me...
He was using the word "pussies" in it's derogatory slang sense; cats tend to show a lot more courage as a species than the members of a certain nation state have recently.;-)
In any case, the only thing cats hate more than being patronized is humans anthropomorphizing them;-D
Climate change on a global scale will lead to more wars over resources, even if it's just regional warfare. How is this not a national security issue and within the purview of the CIA?
By saying that it's not a national security issue unless all issues are such, you're comparing it to such trivial idiocy as Britney Spear's latest relationship scandal or any of a million other things that would *seriously* be a waste of their time.
You forgot the giant mirrors the AGW supporters have already built and launched, hiding stealthed in high orbit, that are really the reason the glaciers are melting and temperatures are rising. The Illuminati started this all from Germany after WWII from a hidden rocket base secretly funded by the Soviet Union and US in an attempt to take over the whole world's economics by forcing everyone to pay for carbon credits fifty years later.
Oh, and the sea lions? They are really genetically morphed secret agents busily altering ocean temperatures using giant spa pumps and killing off coral reefs and other ocean flora/fauna using cyanide.
All millions of scientists worldwide who think that GW/AGW is a real problem are all SECRETLY FUNDED BY THE ILLUMINATI.
I expect a knock at the door any second now... c'ya.
Any legislator that voted for these extensions should be voted out of office, no matter their party affiliation.
Tell that to the voters.
I do. I educate every one of them I have an opportunity to.
Most of them, when they find out the truth of what's going on, are outraged. Unfortunately most of them get outraged over the money aspect (how dare they make money I can't!) rather than it violating the principles of the foundations of this country, but I guess one can't have everything;(
Yeah, I've run into the expired ink message. Only once when the cartridge hadn't run past it's expiration date, and HP replaced that cartridge for free once I let them know the particulars.
I'm well aware that they have expiration dates on their printer cartridges and that the software can read them, and I've made my opinion on that quite clear with the HP reps I've dealt with. I think it's wrong, as well. But I - and nearly everyone I have dealt with - tend to use the cartridges up well before any the expiration date becomes a problem.
Actually, my biggest beef with the printer industry in general is that the ink cartridges aren't big enough and they cost too much. I'd much rather they priced the printers for what they really cost and lowered the price on the cartridges to what they really cost. (As long as I'm talking about that, I'll include cellphones in that rant, as well. I much prefer up-front honest pricing)
I don't know about Brother printers, don't encounter many of them and have never owned one. They may well make good printers, they certainly made good typewriters back in the day. If their printers work better with Linux out of the box, great! Good to hear, I'll pass it on- but also do my own research on it.
Chisel all you want; chiseling anything in stone is damned hard work; I can testify to that, having done so at a few points in my life - and masonry work of that caliber I charge >$50/hour for.;) - hell, just tooling up for that at a basic level costs a few thousand dollars. I own the tools.
If a "bag of ass" is what my overactive imagination tells me it is, you can keep that particular bit of cuisine; I've eaten many things most snobbish people would turn their noses up at, but never a bag of ass.
However, I suspect it'd be rather hard to force a printer to eat one. Printers in general tend to be rather picky when it comes to eating paper stock that isn't fed to them the right way, nevermind a _bag_ of anything.
As to "douche", well, I'm in my forties, and my girlfriend is going thru menopause in a rather serious way; I suspect you have no idea what the term means. I would respectfully suggest that you move out of your parents basement, and refrain from commenting on that topic until you have lived with a woman for more then 24 hours, know what it's like to have to buy more than 24 rolls of toilet paper a week, and don't get embarrassed when you have to tell the cashier at the grocery store that yes, it's for my lady friend. If you ever manage to do so.
They (the corporation, see my other post on this subject) don't want to hire competent people who know what they are doing.
They want to hire sales drones they can pay a pittance.
This has been true since I started shopping Radio Shack's back in the late 70s. Even if the manager wants to hire decent people, the corporation won't let them. It's a rare instance when a local manager manages to slip a competent person thru the hiring process.
I got laid off earlier this year, and since I personally knew the manager of the local Radio Shack (and have a lot of respect for him, he and his wife are pretty sharp), I thought I'd go in and put in an application for PT work. It's not like I'm not qualified - I've done everything they do there from sales to electronics and computer repair; and was told that he had no positions open. I was pretty hard up at the time, deep in bills - I am (was:( ) a professional maintenance tech for HUD/RD apartment complexes with a lot of years of experience there in addition to my other skills, and people with my background don't exactly grow on trees, but there aren't many openings here in this small town.
After a couple weeks had passed, I heard that he had lost one of his personnel, so I called him back. He told me that he'd love to hire me, but that the company had passed my application up because I was "overqualified" for the position. He apologized so much for it I felt sorry for him and told him so.
Since then, he has been thru 18 (yes, eighteen) different employees - since March this year - mostly, from what I've seen going in there, kids in their early 20s (not meant to be derogatory towards those kids, but it was plain that none of then knew a damned thing about the products they were selling, but they looked and dressed nice) - and he told me two weeks ago that he's considering leaving Radio Shack after managing that store for nearly twenty years, because corporate won't let him hire, nor pay decently, people who are competent, work hard, know how to sell honestly, and show up on time.
That pretty much sums it up.
My opinion is that "overqualified" is corporate doublespeak for "we don't want to pay you more than $cheap, because we have to maintain our shareholder's income" - which is damned sad, because Radio Shack, in particular - and I speak from almost thirty years of experience shopping there and dealing with employees there - could really benefit from hiring competent, hard working people and paying them a decent wage. Like many other companies - Best Buy, etc - the beancounters who run them think they are saving money by hiring cheap unskilled labor and giving them a basic of training.
What fools, they.
Bitter? Yeah, I am. After working for decades to get where I am, to learn and practice the knowledge and skills I have, being told at this point that I'm "overqualified" for any damned job I get angry, bitter, and question even more the motivations and intelligence of the people who run companies like that. There's entirely too much separation between the upper management's grasp of what their company does and the lower end worker's grasp of what it does.
I know, I know, it's not anything new, but that's my whole point - these people NEVER FUCKING LEARN from the mistakes their predecessors make. That doesn't bode well for the future of this country.
Rant over... it's New Years eve and these things should be said at *least* once a year. Rant on:)
I bought Borland's Turbo Pascal when it came out, and built my first game with it. It was orders of magnitude better than any other programming language software - especially for pascal - that you could buy for the IBM PC at the time. Just the code editor ALONE was worth the 80 bucks or so I think I spent on it. It defined - and still does in some ways - my understanding of what professionally written software was all about.
(I remember some time later showing it to my Pascal instructor at college, and he agreed that it was helluva lot better than the pascal software we worked with there - so much so that he tried to get the college to buy from Borland, but they were already tied in to a contract so it never happened. )
Some years back I used to work for a place where we (re)built a lot of low end machines that we bought in van-lots for our "financially disadvantaged" customers, paired them with equally cheap monitors, sold them for a couple hundred bucks apiece. This was back around '00 when you still couldn't buy a web-capable computer for less than $500 or so new, we sold a lot of them.
As I recall PB's hardware really wasn't all that bad - at least it worked - it was the drivers and software loads that gave us the most problems. We rebuilt hundreds of their Pentium machines, found the best drivers we could (or ran their vid drivers VGA if that was all the monitor would do) - and with a fresh, "tuned-down" windows load on them, they were acceptable surfing/email boxes, for cheap. IIRC the biggest problem we had was either with the video card drivers or with the modems - fortunately we had a lot of excess hardware modems that worked perfectly well.
I haven't lived/worked in that area for a long time now, but I recall that probably half of the service calls I had in the few months before I left was working on those same boxes, mostly virus infections (including AOL *g*)
I still have one of those floppies, and it still reads, more or less (only a few thousand bad bytes on it). it's the one with the "all new 3.0" on the front.
I toy with selling it on Ebay at times... but I like it too much where it is, taped to my bulletin board next to my workstations:)
Indeed! I had a couple support tickets open with HP at that time. In one of them the tech and I were exchanging an email two or three times every hour, trying to troubleshoot a group of networked printers; I saw the announcement in my news feed and mentioned it to the tech in my next email back, his response was along the lines of "Thank god the bitch is leaving, we're all celebrating after work!" I was transferred to another tier up a couple days later because that tech didn't have the expertise to solve the problem we were having, but the relieved and happy attitude was obvious in the calls and emails there, too.
It seemed to me that after that there was a noticeable improvement in their tech support, especially on the phone. I hadn't been paying much attention to it at the time, but it was obvious afterward just how badly that woman screwed that company up.
I still use HP printers exclusively at home, and recommend them to customers as well. They aren't perfect, but they are certainly among the best. My most reliable printer, a PSC 2350, has performed like a champ since I bought it new, despite having been dismantled and rebuilt a couple times to clean out enormous amounts of cat hair and assorted species of dust bunnies. Like another poster mentioned, I tend to use the raw drivers and my own apps, but I have a lot of customers who are happy with their software as well. (Hint: Don't update unless it's absolutely necessary for a bug fix).
I've also found that overall their printers tend to be the ones that work the best with linux.
Bruce Schneier has decrypted the results of millions of years of trillions of monkeys trying to duplicate all of modern civilization. He doesn't publish the results because it'd mean the end of All We Hold Dear (TM).
Hey, at least the guy has some feelings, give him a break. Chuck never attempted anything like that.
But with all respect, honored sir, I'll submit that a long, old fashioned umbrella might also benefit from sharpening the tip of it, especially if said tip is the usual four inches long, which is long enough to pierce some of the major arteries of the body, if they are not armored against such weapons.
Otherwise, it is mostly a weapon to bluff with - not without merit, as the honored sir points out; but I would respectfully submit that a device which is not potentially lethal cannot truly be considered a weapon.
All of the people with *any* history of martial arts training aren't going to be able to fly at all. I'm sure just about every politician out there has seen at least *one* martial arts movie with the hero in it killing dozens of *armed people* without a scratch on him or her.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least some things never change.
SB
Net10:
1840:2
Tracfone:
26000:1850
Ouch :)
SB
Except that he wasn't generalizing, as you are, but talking about a specific region - where he happens to live. Are you familiar with the native history of that region well enough to really call him on it?
SB
Thanks for that; another website to add to my list of silly, stupid human internet endeavors which I have no desire to know about :)
SB
You mean you think the CIA *doesn't* track religious fanatics and militants who may pose a threat to the US? Like islamic terrorists, for example?
I definitely agree with your statement about religions and wars, btw :) What I took issue with was the silly broadness of your last statement; it's obvious that the CIA has to pick and choose what they have the resources to keep track of, and those resources are not infinite.
But don't feel insulted; *everyone* says stupid things on occasion (some people more than occasionally), including me...
SB
He was using the word "pussies" in it's derogatory slang sense; cats tend to show a lot more courage as a species than the members of a certain nation state have recently. ;-)
In any case, the only thing cats hate more than being patronized is humans anthropomorphizing them ;-D
SB
Climate change on a global scale will lead to more wars over resources, even if it's just regional warfare. How is this not a national security issue and within the purview of the CIA?
By saying that it's not a national security issue unless all issues are such, you're comparing it to such trivial idiocy as Britney Spear's latest relationship scandal or any of a million other things that would *seriously* be a waste of their time.
Yes, your statement was pretty stupid.
SB
You forgot the giant mirrors the AGW supporters have already built and launched, hiding stealthed in high orbit, that are really the reason the glaciers are melting and temperatures are rising. The Illuminati started this all from Germany after WWII from a hidden rocket base secretly funded by the Soviet Union and US in an attempt to take over the whole world's economics by forcing everyone to pay for carbon credits fifty years later.
Oh, and the sea lions? They are really genetically morphed secret agents busily altering ocean temperatures using giant spa pumps and killing off coral reefs and other ocean flora/fauna using cyanide.
All millions of scientists worldwide who think that GW/AGW is a real problem are all SECRETLY FUNDED BY THE ILLUMINATI.
I expect a knock at the door any second now... c'ya.
SB
Any legislator that voted for these extensions should be voted out of office, no matter their party affiliation.
Tell that to the voters.
I do. I educate every one of them I have an opportunity to.
Most of them, when they find out the truth of what's going on, are outraged. Unfortunately most of them get outraged over the money aspect (how dare they make money I can't!) rather than it violating the principles of the foundations of this country, but I guess one can't have everything ;(
SB
Yeah, I've run into the expired ink message. Only once when the cartridge hadn't run past it's expiration date, and HP replaced that cartridge for free once I let them know the particulars.
I'm well aware that they have expiration dates on their printer cartridges and that the software can read them, and I've made my opinion on that quite clear with the HP reps I've dealt with. I think it's wrong, as well. But I - and nearly everyone I have dealt with - tend to use the cartridges up well before any the expiration date becomes a problem.
Actually, my biggest beef with the printer industry in general is that the ink cartridges aren't big enough and they cost too much. I'd much rather they priced the printers for what they really cost and lowered the price on the cartridges to what they really cost. (As long as I'm talking about that, I'll include cellphones in that rant, as well. I much prefer up-front honest pricing)
I don't know about Brother printers, don't encounter many of them and have never owned one. They may well make good printers, they certainly made good typewriters back in the day. If their printers work better with Linux out of the box, great! Good to hear, I'll pass it on- but also do my own research on it.
Chisel all you want; chiseling anything in stone is damned hard work; I can testify to that, having done so at a few points in my life - and masonry work of that caliber I charge >$50/hour for. ;) - hell, just tooling up for that at a basic level costs a few thousand dollars. I own the tools.
If a "bag of ass" is what my overactive imagination tells me it is, you can keep that particular bit of cuisine; I've eaten many things most snobbish people would turn their noses up at, but never a bag of ass.
However, I suspect it'd be rather hard to force a printer to eat one. Printers in general tend to be rather picky when it comes to eating paper stock that isn't fed to them the right way, nevermind a _bag_ of anything.
As to "douche", well, I'm in my forties, and my girlfriend is going thru menopause in a rather serious way; I suspect you have no idea what the term means. I would respectfully suggest that you move out of your parents basement, and refrain from commenting on that topic until you have lived with a woman for more then 24 hours, know what it's like to have to buy more than 24 rolls of toilet paper a week, and don't get embarrassed when you have to tell the cashier at the grocery store that yes, it's for my lady friend. If you ever manage to do so.
Cheers.
SB
They (the corporation, see my other post on this subject) don't want to hire competent people who know what they are doing.
They want to hire sales drones they can pay a pittance.
This has been true since I started shopping Radio Shack's back in the late 70s. Even if the manager wants to hire decent people, the corporation won't let them. It's a rare instance when a local manager manages to slip a competent person thru the hiring process.
SB
Sad, yeah.
I got laid off earlier this year, and since I personally knew the manager of the local Radio Shack (and have a lot of respect for him, he and his wife are pretty sharp), I thought I'd go in and put in an application for PT work. It's not like I'm not qualified - I've done everything they do there from sales to electronics and computer repair; and was told that he had no positions open. I was pretty hard up at the time, deep in bills - I am (was :( ) a professional maintenance tech for HUD/RD apartment complexes with a lot of years of experience there in addition to my other skills, and people with my background don't exactly grow on trees, but there aren't many openings here in this small town.
After a couple weeks had passed, I heard that he had lost one of his personnel, so I called him back. He told me that he'd love to hire me, but that the company had passed my application up because I was "overqualified" for the position. He apologized so much for it I felt sorry for him and told him so.
Since then, he has been thru 18 (yes, eighteen) different employees - since March this year - mostly, from what I've seen going in there, kids in their early 20s (not meant to be derogatory towards those kids, but it was plain that none of then knew a damned thing about the products they were selling, but they looked and dressed nice) - and he told me two weeks ago that he's considering leaving Radio Shack after managing that store for nearly twenty years, because corporate won't let him hire, nor pay decently, people who are competent, work hard, know how to sell honestly, and show up on time.
That pretty much sums it up.
My opinion is that "overqualified" is corporate doublespeak for "we don't want to pay you more than $cheap, because we have to maintain our shareholder's income" - which is damned sad, because Radio Shack, in particular - and I speak from almost thirty years of experience shopping there and dealing with employees there - could really benefit from hiring competent, hard working people and paying them a decent wage. Like many other companies - Best Buy, etc - the beancounters who run them think they are saving money by hiring cheap unskilled labor and giving them a basic of training.
What fools, they.
Bitter? Yeah, I am. After working for decades to get where I am, to learn and practice the knowledge and skills I have, being told at this point that I'm "overqualified" for any damned job I get angry, bitter, and question even more the motivations and intelligence of the people who run companies like that. There's entirely too much separation between the upper management's grasp of what their company does and the lower end worker's grasp of what it does.
I know, I know, it's not anything new, but that's my whole point - these people NEVER FUCKING LEARN from the mistakes their predecessors make. That doesn't bode well for the future of this country.
Rant over... it's New Years eve and these things should be said at *least* once a year. Rant on :)
SB
Yes!
I bought Borland's Turbo Pascal when it came out, and built my first game with it. It was orders of magnitude better than any other programming language software - especially for pascal - that you could buy for the IBM PC at the time. Just the code editor ALONE was worth the 80 bucks or so I think I spent on it. It defined - and still does in some ways - my understanding of what professionally written software was all about.
(I remember some time later showing it to my Pascal instructor at college, and he agreed that it was helluva lot better than the pascal software we worked with there - so much so that he tried to get the college to buy from Borland, but they were already tied in to a contract so it never happened. )
SB
Some years back I used to work for a place where we (re)built a lot of low end machines that we bought in van-lots for our "financially disadvantaged" customers, paired them with equally cheap monitors, sold them for a couple hundred bucks apiece. This was back around '00 when you still couldn't buy a web-capable computer for less than $500 or so new, we sold a lot of them.
As I recall PB's hardware really wasn't all that bad - at least it worked - it was the drivers and software loads that gave us the most problems. We rebuilt hundreds of their Pentium machines, found the best drivers we could (or ran their vid drivers VGA if that was all the monitor would do) - and with a fresh, "tuned-down" windows load on them, they were acceptable surfing/email boxes, for cheap. IIRC the biggest problem we had was either with the video card drivers or with the modems - fortunately we had a lot of excess hardware modems that worked perfectly well.
I haven't lived/worked in that area for a long time now, but I recall that probably half of the service calls I had in the few months before I left was working on those same boxes, mostly virus infections (including AOL *g*)
Nostalgia...
SB
I still have one of those floppies, and it still reads, more or less (only a few thousand bad bytes on it). it's the one with the "all new 3.0" on the front.
I toy with selling it on Ebay at times... but I like it too much where it is, taped to my bulletin board next to my workstations :)
Nostalgia!
SB
Indeed! I had a couple support tickets open with HP at that time. In one of them the tech and I were exchanging an email two or three times every hour, trying to troubleshoot a group of networked printers; I saw the announcement in my news feed and mentioned it to the tech in my next email back, his response was along the lines of "Thank god the bitch is leaving, we're all celebrating after work!" I was transferred to another tier up a couple days later because that tech didn't have the expertise to solve the problem we were having, but the relieved and happy attitude was obvious in the calls and emails there, too.
It seemed to me that after that there was a noticeable improvement in their tech support, especially on the phone. I hadn't been paying much attention to it at the time, but it was obvious afterward just how badly that woman screwed that company up.
Slashdot's article was quite a fun read as well :)
I still use HP printers exclusively at home, and recommend them to customers as well. They aren't perfect, but they are certainly among the best. My most reliable printer, a PSC 2350, has performed like a champ since I bought it new, despite having been dismantled and rebuilt a couple times to clean out enormous amounts of cat hair and assorted species of dust bunnies. Like another poster mentioned, I tend to use the raw drivers and my own apps, but I have a lot of customers who are happy with their software as well. (Hint: Don't update unless it's absolutely necessary for a bug fix).
I've also found that overall their printers tend to be the ones that work the best with linux.
SB
Bruce Schneier has decrypted the results of millions of years of trillions of monkeys trying to duplicate all of modern civilization. He doesn't publish the results because it'd mean the end of All We Hold Dear (TM).
Hey, at least the guy has some feelings, give him a break. Chuck never attempted anything like that.
SB
which is not potentially lethal
Addendum ;)
"to more than one target on the body"
SB
Indeed!
But with all respect, honored sir, I'll submit that a long, old fashioned umbrella might also benefit from sharpening the tip of it, especially if said tip is the usual four inches long, which is long enough to pierce some of the major arteries of the body, if they are not armored against such weapons.
Otherwise, it is mostly a weapon to bluff with - not without merit, as the honored sir points out; but I would respectfully submit that a device which is not potentially lethal cannot truly be considered a weapon.
SB
as far as the TSA and similar efforts go, the Emperor not only has no clothes,
A friend of mine not long ago likened it to the Emperor doing a strip tease in public, and the media didn't show up, save for a few bloggers ;)
Irony is still one of the least appreciated forms of humor...
SB
Now you've gone and done it.
All of the people with *any* history of martial arts training aren't going to be able to fly at all. I'm sure just about every politician out there has seen at least *one* martial arts movie with the hero in it killing dozens of *armed people* without a scratch on him or her.
Chuck Norris is going to be PISSED OFF.
SB
I just wanted to comment on your sig in relation to the discussion:
"We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around."
Aren't those standard equipment on commercial aircraft? ;-)
Queue movie plot now... damn, maybe I should patent the idea first...
SB
Is it a "battered black umbrella, with a couple of bullet holes in it"? ;)
SB
(a recommendation to read Robert Frezza and his Small Colonial War series of SF books is in order here)
(an old fashioned long umbrella has a lot more reach and potential lethality, at least if one can make modifications to it...)
He obviously doesn't do tech support.
SB
But does it use Glitter?
Gives the old, often used adage of "glittering eyes" an entirely new dimension. Plus, think of what a hit it'd be at parties :)
SB